Erin Smith
Astoria, NY, United States
Erin Smith was diagnosed with celiac disease in the early 1980s, so she’s been eating gluten-free almost her entire life. Erin has a unique perspective of growing up in the gluten-free community and blogs about living — and enjoying — a gluten-free lifestyle.
Erin Smith has been writing her gluten-free lifestyle blog Gluten-Free Fun since 2007. In 2011, she launched Gluten-Free Globetrotter, a website that encourages those with celiac disease to travel the world and not be scared about eating gluten-free domestically and abroad. Erin is also the lead organizer of the NYC Celiac Disease Meetup group, a social community that has grown to over 1850 members in the 8 years she has been organizing the group.
http://glutenfreefun.blogspot.com
http://glutenfreeglobetrotter.comSee my complete profile

Despite what appears to be strong support from the gluten-free community, Starbucks is discontinuing its Valencia Orange Cake. This is a tremendous blow to the gluten-free community. It’s already so hard to find good, safe gluten-free options. Having a gluten-free treat at Starbucks was an enormous win for the community. It’s sad to see it disappear such a short time later, without any real explanation.

We’ve put together a petition to let Starbucks know how much we miss the gluten-free cake and to let them know we’d love to see it back in our local Starbucks!

We have 1,900 signatures so far – our goal is 5,000. We chose the goal of 5,000 because it’s a number we think Starbucks would sit up and pay attention to. When we reach our goal, we will present the petition to Starbucks corporate headquarters.

Please join us in our quest to get more options for gluten-free people around the country. I’ll keep you posted.Thank you for reading this.

4 Comments:

I didn't care for the Orange Cake - too sweet and mushy for a breakfast food. Obviously there was too much waste or Starbucks wouldnt have discontinued it. If we want to have major corporations meet our needs, we need to support the effort with our wallets along with our comments. How many people are just signing this petition but never went and bought the Orange Cake? Let's tell Starbucks what we would buy, and what they could provide that wouldn't be as perishable or unhealthy.

Connie, here in NYC there were some Starbucks that were completely sold out of the gluten-free cake. I think our NYC Celiac Disease Meetup group and other groups did a really good job promoting this cake. There have also been full page ads in the New York Times. I wonder how widely publicized the gluten-free cakes were outside of NYC. The lack of knowledge of its availability may have lead to its demise.